![]() Now he needed Jerolmack’s help to show that this is what nature does.īut they kept finding cuboid averages in nature, plus a few non-cubes that could be explained with the same theories. Domokos had proved it mathematically, he said. Considered together, they would all be shadowy approximations converging on a sort of ideal cube. But from mathematics alone, Domokos argued, any rocks that broke randomly would crack into shapes that have, on average, six faces and eight vertices. Mica flakes into sheets crystals crack on sharply defined axes. Houses can be built out of bricks, but Earth is made of rocks. What if the world is made of cubes?Īt first, Jerolmack objected. “What if I told you that the number was always somewhere around six?” Then he asked a bigger question, one that he hoped would worm its way into his colleague’s brain. “How many facets do each of these gravel pieces have?” he said. Their feet crunched over crushed limestone. The two men walked across a gravel lot behind the house, where Jerolmack’s wife ran a taco cart. Domokos carried with him his suitcases, a bad cold and a burning secret. On a mild autumn day in 2016, the Hungarian mathematician Gábor Domokos arrived on the geophysicist Douglas Jerolmack’s doorstep in Philadelphia. ![]()
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